News

Scramble for hotel tax relief costs the exchequer 280m

A HOTEL tax breaks scheme will cost the exchequer more than €280m, after 200 applications were made in the weeks before it ended last December.

In the last two months of 2004, 217 planning applications were lodged which involved the building of 15,123 hotel bedrooms.

The number of applications was far higher than usual — a Prime Time Investigates report to be shown on RTE television tomorrow will reveal — and included one from a consortium including Dick Spring, the former tanaiste and Labour party leader, for a 136-bed, 37-suite development at Ballybunion in Kerry.

Other applications were for a 70-bed hotel at Abbeville, the home of former taoiseach Charles Haughey, and an extension to the U2-owned Clarence hotel, in a deal put together by investor Derek Quinlan. Donie Cassidy, a Fianna Fail TD, applied to turn the National Waxworks Museum in Dublin into a hotel.